Strength of mothers, not their weakness, which thinkers fear

I COULDN’T wait to get my hands on it.

The Conflict, by one of France’s leading intellectuals, Elisabeth Badinter, topped the European book charts and has unleashed bales of newsprint in the US where it’s just come out.

It has different subtitles in different translations, but the clearest is: “How modern motherhood undermines the status of women.”

Badinter says that western mothers have lost the equality they had gained by giving their children too much. Too much time, too much energy and way too much breast milk. By contrast, French women have held out against the forces of repression and kept motherhood “at a distance.” For them there is no such thing as nature or maternal instinct.

They don’t invest too much in their children and they don’t breast feed, or not for long. This means that although their social supports are not as strong as those of their Nordic sisters, they are more likely to go back to full-time work after kids.

But she ends on a note of some alarm: how long can these gallant French gals hold out against their babies? What this book is, after all the hoo-haa, is good old-fashioned patriarchy calling itself feminism. The Conflict pits the woman against her body and against her baby and it makes the mother the enemy of the woman.

Because the woman — “La Femme” — should not concern herself with babies or children. Zut, alors, pas du tout! She should concern herself with her man.

How can a woman feel sexy if she is breastfeeding? How can “the breastfeeding breast” be distinguished from “the sexual breast”? It’s alright for the woman who may get pleasure from the feeding. But she won’t “necessarily” be an object of desire for the man watching her.

This is being sold, quite seriously, as a feminist position. Don’t breastfeed because your man may not get off on it. He probably won’t. And you probably won’t want him to. Because if you’ve got a small baby you’re probably not that into sex.

I certainly wasn’t. I remember the morning after I had my first baby, an enthusiastic male doctor approached me with a flip chart and suggested I shouldn’t get pregnant again for another six weeks.

I told him it was clear he had never had the experience of a total stranger coming out from between his legs.

But so what if it takes a few months, even a few years, for your love life to return? Unless you’re hit with a tragedy, there are plenty of years left for La Femme and her man. Years when you could spend Sunday morning running around the house dressed as Orangutans and your teenage children still wouldn’t get out of bed.

Surely a woman should expect that in a loving relationship, based on equality, the man will be prepared to bide his time? But as Badinter admits, the French culture of carelessness towards infants and children has its roots deep in French chauvinism. In 17th and 18th France, women who considered themselves “above the common people” thought breast feeding “disgusting”.

They had the sprogs to pass on the husband’s name and inheritance. But then they dumped them with wet nurses and got on with their social lives: showing off their new clothes and going to the theatre.

The men could have plenty of sex with their wives, instead of worrying that they might “spoil” the milk, which was a common superstition.

As Badinter helpfully explains, the babies “died like flies.” This was part of the cultural tradition she wants to defend.

No-one’s saying bottle-feeding is as dangerous for first world babies as wet-nursing was in the 18th century. But neither is anyone saying it is nearly as good for babies as breast milk.

Except Badinter, who contends that formula is “more and more like breastmilk.” Nestle couldn’t have put it better. For the record, the public relations company Publicis, of which Badinter is Board Chair, has promoted Nestle as well as the products of other major infant formula producers. Badinter is listed as the 13th richest French citizen.

But her horror of the breast seems far more pathological than commercial. Breastfeeding doesn’t tie a woman down, as she says it does, except in the first few weeks. It doesn’t mean you can’t go back to work.

Six months’ exclusive breastfeeding is what the authorities recommend. Surely no feminist could advocate less maternity leave than that? You can go on feeding your child when you’re home from work for as long as you like. I went back to work when my first child was four months old, but I fed him at night for two years.

What seems to terrify Badinter — and much of western culture — is the powerful bond between a breastfeeding mother and child. It is the strength of mothers, not their weakness, which she fears.

In this she is no different than any patriarchal thinker. Since the dawn of western civilisation, and probably far earlier, men have feared the power of women to give birth to new life. And have envied the ferocity of a mother’s love.

Badinter’s feminism is not about women, it is about men. Men and money. Women must work as hard as men so that the machine of traditional capitalism doesn’t slow down. But they must also have babies. Little French men and women to send off to the colonies, I mean, the factories.

I don’t think we should be so concerned about how many babies women have. The planet is already straining to resource its people. Shouldn’t we “mutualise” our people, just like our bank debt? Share people freely between us, rather than building stockpiles of babies in nationalist trenches? But it is important for any society that couples feel free to have the kids they want. And it’s worth looking at why the French birth rate is holding up. Badinter thinks it’s because French women don’t invest so much in motherhood that it’s a burden, as well as the supports which decades of “pronatalism” have brought French families.

But our birth rate is still higher. Badinter puts this down to the influence of the Catholic Church which she says is “incontestable”.

Balderdash. Not only are Irishwomen having more babies than any other women in Europe, they’re also having more babies later in life. So either they’re keeping their legs together for decades at a time, or they’ve discovered contraception.

And they’re still having babies. For many reasons, some of which we can’t understand, Irish women seem to like them.

I think that’s great.

Go for it, I say. Have your babies and insist on choosing how. Insist on getting enough help to feed your baby at the breast if you want to. Don’t let anyone say you can’t.

Go back to work, change your work, delay your work, chuck your work... Do what you want and what your finances allow. However you express your motherhood, don’t let it stop you calling yourself a feminist.

And don’t let Elisabeth Badinter or anyone else tell you that there is a conflict between being a woman and being a mother.

* The Conflict: Woman and Mother is available from Text publishing at £25 and as a Kindle edition on www.amazon.com